Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan on 10 of His Influences

Of all the indie bands considered indispensable to the ’80s and ’90s underground, perhaps none have aged more gracefully, or with as little ceremony, as New Jersey’s own Yo La Tengo. The husband-wife team of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, along with bassist James McNew, who joined the band in 1992, are known equally well for their heart-rending melodies as they are for ear-splitting guitars. For Yo La Tengo’s new record, “Stuff Like That There,” which falls firmly in the former category, the band looks backward to “Fakebook,” an LP that came that out 25 years ago and remains a fan favorite today. Like its predecessor, “Stuff Like That There” is made up predominantly of covers — both of classic acts (Hank Williams, The Cure) and of Yo La Tengo themselves (“Deeper Into Movies,” “The Ballad of Red Buckets”). “We kind of took some of the things from ‘Fakebook’ and said, ‘It’s 25 years later, let’s see what happens if we do it again.’ It’s definitely a companion, in our mind,” Kaplan says.

To coincide with an album that, too, draws from a wide range of influences, Kaplan shared some of his favorite memories with T, from swamp-pop music festivals to Mets baseball. One anecdote combined three things near and dear to Kaplan’s heart: Maxwell’s, the Hoboken venue that played host to Yo La Tengo’s famed Hanukkah shows, Kaplan’s appreciation for Canadian sketch comedy and bootlegged audio recordings — though not in the way one might expect. “I was working at Maxwell’s, so I wasn’t home on Friday nights,” Kaplan says. “Georgia would record ‘SCTV’ on cassette tape, so I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it the next day. I remember Martin Short’s Irving Cohen character. It was years before I saw what he looked like — I just heard him on the cassette.”